memorable

I dreamed that Dani was having her birthday party at my house. We were scurrying around setting up during the afternoon, before she arrived. Mom saw a piece of paper taped to a wall that said

Denielle (sic)
(someone else's name)

And she said, "I don't like it when people shorten their names. I mean, if Daniel shortened his name, it would be Danny!" I did not appreciate her comments but didn't say anything - I kind of wanted to tell her to be respectful to Dani on her birthday, but decided just to let it slide.

I wanted to make some tea, so I put some water in the microwave, then went to my room to choose a tea bag. The tea bags were on my piano, just like they are in real life, but they were organized differently, kind of scattered, and some were on the floor. I also thought that there were some boxes I didn't remember having, but I was in a hurry, so I didn't think about it. I rationalized it by thinking that mom had been messing around with my tea. I picked a bag and left. When I got back to the kitchen, the water wasn't done boiling, so I wandered off.

I found myself near the front door (I think some time elapsed without me remembering) and suddenly I remembered that I had forgotten about the tea water. I sort of leapt and ran my way through the library (the floor was grass) to get back to the kitchen, but I thought that maybe the water hadn't cooled down too much.

The next thing I remember is sitting down on the floor of the library with Dani and my sister. Dani and I were sitting next to each other, and my sister was left and forwards of me, like this:

Code:

sister>
         ^^dani
      me

Between Dani and I there was an atmosphere of having been through a lot, with a lot of sadness but happiness at knowing each other.

Dani told my sister, "Did you know that Caleb proposed to me on date night?"

Apparently proposing (I think she meant asking out) on 'date night' was a very creative/adventurous thing to do. When she said this, I felt a complex emotion, with pride and sorrow and happiness, and I just kind of looked at the ground in sadness, but Dani was smiling a sad smile. My sister didn't really know what was going on, she was like a zombie or something.

Then we all got up because guests were starting to arrive. Dani went off to greet people, and I went to drink my tea and generally hide from everyone. There were tons of people, at least 150. Everyone was packed really tight. I caught glimpses of Dani walking around.

I stayed until midnight, then I had to go drive my little brother somewhere. We were driving until he said, stop here. I got out and we switched places so he could drive. There were colored plastic round things scattered across the road. It was dark and in a haunted-forest type of environment, but I wasn't scared. He said, I need practice at Rock Band, so go set up the cones. Apparently the little cones were Rock Band icons, and he wanted to drive over them to practice songs. He told me the song he wanted, and I was supposed to walk down the road and arrange the cones for a particular song. I thought, oh no, this is going to take forever. I started arranging the cones. Next thing I knew, I was waking up (in my dream still). I was disoriented, but my brother was there, saying, good job, I got enough practice in. Let's go home now. I was distressed because I had left the party early just so my brother could practice his video game skills.

When we got home, the party was over and everyone was gone. Mom was looking really tired. I asked her how long the party lasted. She said, until 6. I was confused because I thought she meant 6 PM, so I started to say "but--but-" but then I realized she meant 6 in the morning, which really surprised me, because I didn't know that I had been away for 6 hours. I was really upset that I hadn't been able to say goodbye to Dani, but Mom said that Dani had been so tired that she decided to spend the night at our house, so I thought, okay, I will see her when she wakes up. I started to help Mom clean up.

When I walked into the kitchen, there was one of those electronic picture frames that shows a slideshow. It was full of pictures from the party. I was very grateful that Mom had taken pictures. Watching the slideshow, everyone's hair was funny, so I realized that they had played some kind of crazy hair game where whoever had the craziest hairdo won. I wanted to see Dani in the slideshow but she wasn't in it. My brother was in there twice, which made me mad because he had been driving with me, keeping me away from the party, and he had actually been at the party, at the same time. I didn't understand how he did it, so I got mad. In one picture, he had a really big long-haired black wig, and the other picture was a video clip of him eating all the party food in fast-motion. There was also a picture of my sister with a really weird hairdo.

I went around the picture frame, which was sitting on the island in the kitchen, and started throwing away plates.

1. My dad had made a scavenger hunt for my mom, and I was helping her with it along with my little brother and sister. Mom was getting more and more emotional as we went, and by the time we found the last clue I could tell that the ending was going to be really special. I decided to wait behind, and told my siblings to wait too, so mom could experience the ending by herself. However, she got to a certain spot about 100 feet away from us and picked up a shovel and started digging, so I decided to go help her. About 45 degrees to the right of her from where I was standing, I saw a shovel under a little roof-with-no-walls, whatever you call those things. I picked it up (it was red) and turned to look at my mom, but she pointed to something that I couldn't see, because something was in the way, but I knew that it was a shovel. So I dropped the shovel I had and went and picked up the other one, which was blue. Then, I went and helped her dig. Buried maybe a foot under the ground was a red and gold chest, which was medium-size. We opened it, and dad had poured an incredible amount of love into this treasure chest. The love poured over us and completely overwhelmed us, and we both started sobbing. It felt amazing. After a minute or so, mom shut the chest. We all got in the car, which was parked a little ways away, and started driving. I was still crying uncontrollably. I was in the passenger seat. We pulled up to a stoplight in the left lane (but still on the right side of the road) and another car pulled up in the right lane. I was already looking out the window, so the car just pulled into my view. In the driver seat was a girl who was maybe in her 20's, but she was sitting on the front of the seat, and a young child was sitting behind her. They looked alike: they both had brown hair and kind of round faces. They both started looking at me, and so I covered my face because I didn't want to see anyone and I didn't want anyone to see me, but just as I was covering my face, I noticed the way the younger girl (she looked like she was maybe 7 or 8) was looking at me. It was a very interesting look, like she wasn't even human, it contained something like coolness or aloofness, but also compassion. Her eyes were very unnatural, or maybe the eyes themselves weren't unnatural, but they jumped out at me, so that I felt like she was actually floating in the space between the two cars, and they were kind of swirling. They kept changing color, from brown to green to blue, to slightly orangeish, to purple, cycling through a bunch of colors, but on certain colors they would sort of flare up, not in an angry sense, but they just seemed more luminous, brighter, and they peaked when they turned to blue, and I felt total understanding in her eyes. Her mouth seemed to say everything at once, but somehow it wasn't disapproving. It's hard to explain, but she seemed to be giving a commentary on everything in the world just by her mouth, and there was positive and negative, but the negative wasn't negative, and the positive was no different from the negative, and both sides sort of combined into an intellectual or at least informed expression of love that dizzied me with how intelligent and fashionable (not good-looking, but sort of... stylish) and somehow she was very beautiful in a strange, nonhuman sort of way, in the same way that you might call a cat beautiful. I think she was a cherub. I noticed all of this in the split second that I was covering my face, or rather I had already seen it but it took me a second to process it, so that by the time I was thinking about her I already had covered my face. And I was still crying, but I sort of slid my hands down my face until I wasn't covering my eyes, but I was still covering my nose and mouth, and we looked at each other, and... were in a sort of communion. During this second look, even her hair was changing colors, gold and dark brown and orange, it flared up just like her eyes when it turned orange, and she opened her mouth and I felt like I was going to die, and then my car started going, leaving the other car behind, but I was only partially aware that she wasn't even there anymore, because she was sort of burnt into my mind. The last thing I remember is my vision going dark, with her hair turning fiery red (she wasn't even there anymore, this was from the after-image) and turning into a blanket, which was flat like a floating square, but tilted a little bit, so that the right bottom corner was lower than the left one, and then it was coming towards me, enveloping my vision, and still rotating clockwise, until it totally covered me.


Definitely one of the best dreams I have ever had.




2. My second dream, after I woke up and went back to sleep, was much more prosaic. I was in a building, and I was standing there, and I was supposed to go somewhere, but I wasn't, don't know why, but anyway there was this girl, who looked kind of like a fish and a lollipop put together, sounds weird but that's the only way to describe her (she was kind of weird looking). She was doing the same thing as me, just standing there, and I had a feeling we had a lot in common. I said hi and we had a pretty long conversation which I don't remember, but I was thinking, we could definitely be pretty good friends, so I asked her what her name was, and she said "Legack". I thought, that's a strange name but whatever, and typed it into my phone, and said, let's swap phone numbers. She said sure, and told me her phone number (I don't remember it) and I typed it into my phone, and she typed mine into her phone, although I don't remember actually telling her my number. Then (I have an iphone, and when you're entering a new contact on iphone, there are like a million slots where you can type little facts about the person) I started scrolling through the facts, and they looked really complicated. They were all computer-programming-y, and had to do with how texting worked. For example, a lot of them were slots where you could type some code saying 'if this person says a, display it on my phone as b'. I was scrolling through them, saying, "okay, I don't think we need to do any of this" but she said "no it's important". So we stood there for a while, both looking at my phone trying to figure how to type the right codes in, but we couldn't really figure it out.

I am riding in the car with my mom, brother, sister, and aunt. We're going to the park to pick apples. Suddenly, I have a vision which lasts maybe 2 seconds before fading away. It is of some sort of goddess-type being. She is not really a goddess, maybe a minor deity. She is young, has long blue hair, and was wearing a blue and white dress. She is floating in front of the car and sort of going at the same pace as us. She is very large (not overweight), kind of like is you scaled up a regular person to two-and-a-half or three times the height, keeping the rest proportional. She is also two dimensional, and kind of tilted backwards, so that the top of her recedes a little because it's farther away. She is holding up one arm, in a pose that is vaguely similar to the statue of liberty holding her torch, except my spirit is more expressive and joyful in her pose. Her facial expression is kind of complex. Her mouth is open a little, indicating that she is full of joyful wonder, but also that she is shocked and upset, and she exudes something like fear or caution. Anyway, she's holding up her hand as if she is holding a torch or something, only nothing is in her hand. I know that she is supposed to be holding an apple, so I realize that she is warning me that the park we're going to won't have apples. I express concern aloud (not referring to my vision, just saying that I'm worried that there won't be any apples) and suggest that we go to a different park, but my aunt overrules me.

Then, my brother says a phrase of three nonsense words. We're trying to figure out what he is talking about, and my aunt says, "it's like a test of star wars knowledge (the flavor of it was that it was a question that had started out as a riddle one star wars fan had posed to another, but sort of became a stock phrase star wars fans would pull out to indicate their hardcoreness, and to see if anyone else knew what they were talking about, so it sort of became a greeting between star wars fans.) The question is, 'do you know what kind of apple they ate on (such-and-such a planet, don't remember the name)?'" Then she turned to me and said, "You know, right?" I was horrified that someone would suspect me of having such knowledge. I said nothing and sort of retreated into myself, thinking about the goddess.

I remember three dreams, and each of them is centered around a certain pattern. The basic pattern was a continuous image with parts covered up by blocks that were all the same color.

1. My brother brings a movie to me and we decide to watch it. He puts it in the player, and I tell him that I've already seen most of it. When it loads up on the screen, it shows how much of the movie I've already seen. It displays a representation of the movie as something like a combination of a mural and sheet music. There were horizontal rows of images going down the screen, and so if you 'read' each line you could see what happened in the movie. However, a lot of it was blacked-out because I hadn't seen those parts. You'd think that if I hadn't seen the whole movie then I must have seen maybe the beginning, and then maybe some scenes from the middle or something, but the screen showed that I had seen one or two hundred tiny segments that couldn't have been more than a couple of seconds each, and they were scattered evenly over the whole duration of the movie. It looked kind of like the 'mural' was missing pixels.

2. I am thinking about my eyes. They are an unusual but kind of nice color of blue (my eyes are not blue irl) and in the dream I thought they looked kind of like that painting by Magritte:



I was travelling while I was thinking. It was sort of a combination of walking and falling, mainly forwards but pulled a little to the right as well. It felt like three different things:
1. Like I was in orbit around the sun
2. Like I was walking
3. This one's kind of hard to explain, but it felt like I was a bird of prey swooping down, except the whole scene was sideways. Kind of like if you were lying on your side so that the grass was on the right and the sky was on your left, and you saw a bird swoop but it looked like it was going right instead of down.

Anyway, I felt like I was in control (since I was walking), but I also felt really stylish because I was orbiting. I was 'swooping down' on some friends who I knew were around the corner, and I was thinking that they were going to think I was so cool when they saw me. But I was still thinking about my eyes, and I thought, what if I got my eyes painted (as in literally painting my eyeballs)? I thought that would be so cool. I was trying to decide what pattern to paint on them, and I settled on a checkerboard pattern where I would paint white squares that matched the white of my eye over the colored part of my eye. Then, as I pictured this, I scaled the blocks up and down, trying to decide what was the best size. When they were big, I thought it looked kind of retro. Then I made then shrink, and it started to resemble the 'nothing channel' on TV (I don't know what it's really called but I'm talking about the black and white fuzzy one). Finally they were too small to really be detectable but they made my eyes look glittery or sparkly. I liked all of them but decided on the glittery one.

(This is the second time I have dreamed about having different patterns on my eyes)



3. I am cooking a pie with my sister. I walk in the kitchen as she pulls it out of the oven. For some reason we baked it without crust on top. I don't know what kind of pie it was, but it was kind of bluish-purplish-blackish. I got little crust squares and placed them in the checkerboard pattern on top of the pie.

1. It was the end of the summer, and I was going back to school. My cousin walked with me. To get there we went through this really pretty forest. The school year was going to start with our class going on a train ride and having class with snacks in the train. Everyone was supposed to bring a couch to sit on. Even though my cousin wasn't part of the class, I decided that he could tag along. We picked out a couch from several that were just sitting in the forest. It was royal blue, and the seat cushions were very light yellow. Pretty hideous. I picked up the left end, and my cousin picked up the other end, and we started carrying it to the train. We got to the train, which was sitting just outside the forest. The track went for a little ways where you could see it, but then it curved into a gorgeous canyon full of fruit trees. The non-forest place was lighter than the forest. The forest was like a night but with really bright moon and stars. The outside place was like a day but with a really weak sun that had very yellow light. Anyway, I told my cousin to put down the couch and I went into the train to scout it out and find a good spot. It was already really crowded, and the only spot to put a couch was right in the doorway. D was sitting on the left side of the couch that would be to our right, and I wanted to sit next to her, so I decided to orchestrate the couch placement so that I would end up next to her. The problem was, my cousin had the right side of the couch, which was the side that would be next to the left side of her couch. We picked up the couch, and I hurried forwards so that I would be the first one in the train door. Then, I maneuvered the couch so that it was backwards. That way, our left side aligned with her couch's left side. The downside of this was that our couch was looking at the wall so we wouldn't be able to see the professor, and also we would look weird. I wasn't too worried about that, though. I sat down on my side of the couch and sure enough, I was right next to D, only on a different couch. I expected my cousin to sit down on the other side of the couch, but I guess he didn't want to sit backwards, because he wandered off. I thought he would probably be able to find a seat somewhere else. The next thing I knew, I was on the right side of the couch. I kind of questioned how I had gotten there, and my mind said that the train had lurched forward and that I had slid. Someone got up to close the train door, but they left it a little open, and since my couch was facing the door, I could see a silver tree with pink leaves out the doorway. I looked around and saw Cassie to my left. I started telling her about some interesting tree I had seen in the forest, but she interrupted me and said, "We haven't seen each other in like three months!", the point being that I hadn't even said hi but had just launched into telling her a story. We both started laughing and hugged each other. Then she started rubbing her shoulder against me, like a cat. At first I thought this was weird, but then I decided that it was a reasonable thing to do, so I started rubbing my shoulder against her.


2. I am in the car with my family, pulling out of the driveway. My brother asks, "Where are we going again?" and I tell him, "We're going to California to eat, because that's where I picked for my birthday." My friend texts me, only my phone beeps differently than it does irl: sort of a short-long beep that's the same pitch both times, and the tone reminds me of the color blue. The text says, "Hey, happy birthday! We wanted to come over and make art with you, how does that sound?" My vision switches to him and Cassie putting glitter on masks. There are about six other people with them, but they are all wearing masks so I can't recognize them. I think, "aww, that's really sweet" but I tell him "Sorry, I'm going to California with my family, and I won't be back until tonight, so we can do it then." I don't text him or even call him to say this, I just say it out loud, but I know that he heard it.

*Recovered from 6-13-11*


Sorry it's been a while; my computer was broken.


1. I was part of a small group that was supposed to infiltrate the enemy base. It was situated in a snowy forest It was in a sort of pit, such that only the top four or five feet popped out over the snow, and to get to it you had to slide down this steep slope that would be hard to escape from if you wanted to retreat. We crawled close to the base, to see how they were guarding it. There were about five guards on every side, except for the back, which had no guards. I crawled around to the back, and then, with my back to the wall, moved left until I got to the corner. I peeked around to get a close look at the guards. They wore white and grey helmets with matching vests, and black boots. All five of them were holding cellos. I darted around the corner and started fighting the closest guard (they were all standing shoulder to shoulder, looking straight forward). I grabbed his cello so he couldn't whack me with it, and for a second we just pulled it back and forth, then I grabbed his bow and started using it as a sword, and he started using his cello as a giant club. I smashed his cello, and at this point the other guards were beginning to notice the fight, so they all gathered around me, trying to whack me with the cellos. However, they were too close to be able to whack effectively, and instead all broke each other's instruments. Suddenly a trumpet sounded from behind me (I was facing the wall at this point), and a bright yellow and green light illuminated the wall. I broke away from the guards and rolled backwards toward the hill, since there was no way I could take all five of the guards, even if they didn't have weapons. I was lying against the hill, watching them come towards me and feeling afraid, when I started to hear sounds of fighting from behind me and also from the front side of the building. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone from my team emerge from the forest and come riding down the hill on a llama. He came down the hill that was associated with the front, but all the way to one side, so that he could charge down my corridor. He was galloping closer, and so the guards that were coming for me got distracted, preparing to deal with him. I took the opportunity to scramble up the hill, intending to investigate the yellow and green lights which had been getting brighter. When I got out of the pit, I saw a giant grey spaceship landing in the middle of a battle which was taking place on a large snowy plain in front of me. I thought, "who are these people... are they with us or are they another group of attackers?" I didn't think that they were on our side because a big attack wasn't part of the plan, so I decided that we had to finish the mission quickly. I turned around and looked down the hill.The llama guy was retreating around the back of the building. Several guards were lying on the ground, but by this time more guards were coming out of the base, so a bunch of them were coming from the front to chase Mr. Llama. I took a grenade from my belt and threw it down the hill, trying to throw it a little ahead of the guards so that it would land by the time they got to it. It exploded in a bright yellow flash, that's the last thing I remember.


2. I was sitting at a piano, and I played a nice chord: C, C#, D#, F#, A. I was very pleased by the sound, and I started thinking of my cat.


3. I was at college and I ran into a girl who goes to my school, whose name I don't know, and we just kind of looked at each other and didn't say anything, but we were communicating without speaking. It's kind of hard to recreate the conversation since it didn't really have any words, but I will try. She showed me the concept of music, as if to say, "You're musical, aren't you?" In response I sent something from Don Giovanni to her, then a duet from Saariaho's opera L'Amour de Loin (which I just watched yesterday). She gave a sort of half-smile, like she was glad to know that her intuition was correct, but she was still waiting for something. I showed her a picture of her playing Chopin on an upright piano (I have heard her play Chopin irl), along with a feeling of admiration, but the admiration had a sort of flavor of, "will you play for me?" So she started walking across campus to where the pianos are, and I was following her, sending her Stockhausen and Messiaen music along the way, which gave us a feeling of a thick blanket and a cat.